The present invention relates to the field of graphical modeling and, more particularly, to managing advisories for complex model nodes in a graphical modeling application.
Graphical modeling applications are effective productivity tools for system design tasks. The graphical modeling application allows for pieces of the system, called nodes, to be graphically represented and related to other nodes of the system. Additional data regarding the requirements and capabilities of a node are also entered into the graphical modeling application to further define the node as well as the type of relationship that the node has to other nodes.
A key function provided by conventional graphical modeling applications is the capability to aggregate all the advisories that affect a particular node. For example, the advisories displayed for a network server can include specific notifications of its subordinate components. This aggregation of advisory information provides a user with an efficient means to access this information and examine the impact of various related requirements and capabilities.
This functionality is possible because conventional graphical modeling applications store the created model as a single entity. That is, the user-entered data defining the graphics and semantics of the model are stored together as one model. Thus, this key functionality is lacking in graphical modeling applications that store graphical and semantic data for a model separately. For example, when a model is created within an ECLIPSE-based modeling application, the graphics used in the model are stored as notation model and the semantic data and relationships are stored as a semantic model. As such, the approaches utilized by conventional graphical modeling applications are not applicable to ECLIPSE-based graphical modeling applications.